Weekend Trip to Sydney

The roommates and I went to Sydney this past weekend.  Videos to follow when I have bandwidth.

Journal notes:

• Free beer at Tullamarine
• Breakfasts at Kaz Cafe
• Opera House
• Psycho Sam
• Harbour Bridge
• I am a one-man wolf pack
• Here's your sign, Angela
• Bondi Beach
• I get to see Drew and Dyana again
• Cool cab driver
• Bad Tiger Airways experience number 2 (of 2)

Pictures:

This is what Sydney Central looks like

I've sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum it put them on the map!

ANZAC Memorial
Commemorating the sacrifices made by soldiers of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps during WWI

Hyde Park

There were a bunch of large photo prints on display in Hyde Park, as part of the Sydney Life portion of Art and About.
I liked this one the best.
It's called Contact, by Matt Kaarma

Historic Chinese Market Gardens, Matraville by Cassandra French

It's Time To Wake Up And Become Sustainable by Jennifer Blau

Super Size Hamburger by Garry Trinh

St. Marys Cathedral

Archibald Fountain

Archibald Fountain

Sydney Harbour Bridge

The Sydney Opera House

They have a hop-on-hop-off catamaran service to take people through the harbor

View of Sydney from the opera house.  That's a cruise ship pulling out of the harbor

Aldo taking a picture of Lisi, Angela, and Michaela

Ian Donaldson ran 1,080 km (671 miles) in 30 days to help fight the battle against depression.
We were there when he crossed the finish line

"I just felt like running"

Psycho Sam thinks he's a robot, and likes to play with fire.
He also gave a kid ten bucks to throw a club at him.
Not at the kid.  At Psycho Sam.

Psycho Sam doesn't make balloon animals. 

This is what happens when you heckle Psycho Sam

Aldo stole the show with his Jean Claude Van Damme impression

Then this guy stole the show from all of them

She said yes!
(and, presumably, a lot of four letter words when they got home)

Sydney Harbour Bridge

View from Sydney Harbour Bridge

Bondi Beach (it's pronounced "bond eye")

It's not the Matisse, but it was still pretty cool to see

Drew and Dyana

This past weekend, my roommates and I flew up to Sydney to do a bit of sightseeing with some friends.    We booked our tickets at the same time, but because I was concerned about the travel time, I booked separately from the rest of the group.  Most of us ended up on the same flights in and out of Sydney, but because I chose a random seat assignment, we ended up on opposite ends of the plane each way.

I got permission to leave work at 5:00 instead of my usual quarter-to-six, since it's a good 45 minutes by train from Mordialloc (the train station closest to the office) to Southern Cross, then another 20 minutes on the Skybus to Tullamarine Airport.  I'd already packed the night before and brought my stuff to work with me, so I didn't have to stop at the house on the way.  None of this really mattered, since when I got to the airport, I found out the flight was delayed by two hours, and they were concerned they might have to cancel our flight.  Turns out, there's a curfew on domestic flights coming into Sydney (and, presumably, other major Australian cities) - they aren't allowed to land past 11:00 PM, in an effort to cut down on nighttime noise levels.

I met up with Aldo, Angela, and Michaela right after checking in for the flight.  The delay meant we had a lot of time to kill once we got through security, so I split off from the rest of the group and made my way over to the nearest airport bar.  There was a big group of guys in line in front of me, and maybe twenty pots of beer on the counter (note: a "pot" is generally the smallest glass of beer you can buy in most places in Australia - it's equivalent to 285ml or 10 fl. oz.)  One of the guys turned around and started to offer me one.  Realizing I wasn't in his group, he just shrugged and offered it anyway.  I got to talking with him, and found out they were an Australian Rules Football ("footy") team from Hobart (in Tasmania).  A few minutes later, a group of girls showed up and ordered a whole bunch of beers.  Turns out, they were a female footy team from Sydney.  They challenged the guys to a beer chugging contest, and won.

Our flight to Sydney was pretty uneventful, which is always a good thing on an airplane, especially after a long delay.  Jetstar is like an Australian version of Southwest Airlines.  The Airbus A320 they fly even looks like a Boeing 737.  If you want a good, cheap flight within Australia or New Zealand, they're the one to use.  No frills, no fuss.

Lisi met us at the airport in Sydney, and we took the train up to Central station.  It's right next to the YHA where Elisa and Britta were staying, but the place was already booked up when we tried to make our reservations.  It was a short walk to the Westend Nomads, where the girl behind the desk admitted there was some sort of mix-up with our reservation.  It worked out in our favor, and we all ended up having a room to ourselves, with its own bathroom and shower.  The elevator was stuck that night, so we had to walk up eleven flights of stairs to get up to our room.  We were all pretty tired, but Aldo and Angela managed to find the energy to go out on the town while the rest of us stayed in the room and checked our eyelids for holes.

Saturday morning, we had breakfast just up the street, at a place called Kaz Cafe.  It was so good that we went there Sunday morning, as well.  Angela had pancakes with ice cream.  I forget what everyone else had, but I had something called The Big Breakfast - bacon, eggs, mushrooms, and toast, with a side of baked beans.  The waitress gave me a confused look when she asked how I wanted my eggs and I responded, "over medium".  "Do you want them poached, fried or scrambled?"  she asked me, and I resigned myself to having scrambled eggs instead.  "Wait till you see the bacon," Lisi teased, and we got to talking about how even simple things like ordering food are so different, in a culture so similar to our own.  I enjoyed my breakfast that morning, especially the ham.

After breakfast, we walked up to Hyde Park and down to the opera house.  While we were taking pictures, we saw a group of people with a big banner, all wearing the same T-shirts.  I figured it was just another tour group, until the news crew showed up.  As it happened, we were at the finish line for an event called Running out of the Blue, where a 25 year old Australian named Ian Donaldson ran 1,080km (over 670 miles) from Brisbane to Sydney in 30 days.

Leaving the opera house, we walked around Circular Quay and watched a street performer named Psycho Sam, who entertained the crowd by doing a robot impression.  He then pulled Aldo and a random Australian guy named Rudy up to spot him while he juggled from atop a crazy looking contraption he'd built himself, blindfolded and with his head on fire.

At the end of the performance, a man in the crowd whispered something to Psycho Sam, and he announced that he had a special request.  The guy immediately went down on one knee and offered a ring to the girl he was with.  It must have come as quite a shock, judging by her reaction, but once she realized he was for real, she accepted his proposal.  (Good on ya, dude.  That's on par with popping the question at the Universal Studios tour, when Jaws pops out of the water.)

After lunch at Circular Quay, Aldo, Angela, Michaela, and I walked across the Harbour Bridge and back, while Lisi watched another street performer fit herself into a 16cm box.  It took us about 45 minutes to get across the bridge, considering how many times we stopped for pictures.  We made the trip back in 30, after a brief respite on the other side of the bridge, and went to Coles to buy sandwiches for our dinner, then back to the room for a bit of rest before going out Saturday night.

Later in the evening, we went to meet up with Elisa and Britta at Star Bar, but while I was in line, the bouncer came up to me and stepped on my foot, and told me I couldn't get in wearing steel toed boots.  The rest of the group had already gone inside, and I couldn't get in touch with them, so I ended up going to a bar across the street from the hostel, where they had $8.50 pints of James Squire and no one cared what kind of shoes I was wearing.

Sunday morning, we checked out of our room and Michaela rented a locker in the hostel for our bags while we went out for the day.  We had breakfast again at Kaz Cafe.  This time, the place was slammed and one of the servers confessed it was her first day.  Even though she wasn't our server, Aldo gave her a tip as we were leaving.

After breakfast, we wandered up to Hyde Park and caught a bus to Bondi Beach.  We weren't sure exactly where we were going, so when we came to Bondi Junction, Angela asked the bus driver if that was our stop.  "No," he said.  "It's the one with all the sand and water in front of it.  Here's your sign."

We didn't realize it at the time, but there are at least two bus stops for Bondi Beach.  Angela and I got off at the first one, then someone hollered out that we wanted the next one, so she jumped back on and the door caught her on the foot.  I didn't even have a chance.  The next stop was just at the bottom of the hill, and because of all the traffic, I got there right about the same time they did.

We spent several hours on the beach.  Aldo and Michaela went off to take pictures, while Lisi and Angela and I laid out to tan.  Angela and I ended up red as lobsters.  Drew and Dyana (my friends from Brisbane) met us there and after Aldo and Michaela got back, they took us to a little cafe near the beach  where we had lunch and good conversation.  My lunch was a dish called "chargrilled board" (I'll leave that one to the reader's imagination).

Leaving Bondi, we headed back to the hostel to collect our bags and catch a train to the airport.  Then someone suggested we could split a cab and it would be way cheaper than each of us buying a train ticket.  The desk clerk phoned a couple cab companies and said that, since there were five of us, we wouldn't be able to book anything smaller than a Maxi Taxi, which would be too expensive.  He suggested we try and flag down a cab on the street, and the second one we hailed agreed to take us.

"See that train, there?" our driver asked as we passed the railway station.  "It's been stuck there since five o'clock today.  They are taking people to the airport by bus.  Now all the cab drivers have figured out what's going on and they're coming here, too."  I got to talking to him (regrettably, I have forgotten his name) and found out that he's a software developer too, and drives a cab on the weekends to pick up extra money.  He told me it had been good for networking - he'd landed a $6000 contract from one of his fares a few months back.

Arriving at the airport around 6:15 PM, we had what I am quickly coming to believe is the typical Tiger Airways experience.  There were two lines to check in, and they were moving people around and trying to rush through all the people who were on the 7:00 flight to Melbourne (ours was the 7:50).  They did the same thing with the 7:30 flight to Gold Coast, which basically meant we had to stand at the front of the line for about half an hour listening to one of the ticket agents yell at people who didn't know what line they were supposed to be in and had unknowingly jumped in front of other people on their flight.  About twenty minutes into it, we realized that Lisi couldn't check in for another hour, because she had a later flight and they don't allow you to check in more than two hours before your flight.  Still, it's not the worst experience I've had with Tiger (the flight when I moved from Brisbane to Melbourne wins that contest, hands down), and at least the lady that checked me in was polite and respectful.

The flight out of Sydney was also delayed, and I was still on the other end of the plane from the rest of the group, but at least Elisa and Britta got to sit with them.  We took a cab from Tullamarine to Southern Cross Station (too tired to realize that we would have been just as well to take it to Flinders Street) and then caught a train back to the house.

And that's how I spent my weekend in Sydney.